Newest Study Guides

Black Butterflies (2022) is set in the spring of 1992 in Sarajevo during the so-called "siege of Sarajevo." Each night during the siege, racist gangs create barriers around the city, separating its ethnic areas into their sections. Each morning,...

Trespasses, published in late 2022, is Louise Kennedy's debut novel. Trespasses are set during the Irish Civil War, called "the Troubles." Specifically, Kennedy's novel follows Cushla, who lives with her mom in a small town in Belfast, Ireland....

Jacqueline Crooks' Fire Rush (2023) is a novel about Jamaican immigration to the United Kingdom during the 1980s. Fire Rush focuses on Yamaye, a rowdy young woman who frequently parties with her friends at a club called "The Crypt."

Yamaye has...

Athol Fugard has spent much of his career chronicling the injustices of Apartheid South Africa. The Train Driver is Fugard's play, published in 2012, and tells the fact-based story of a young mother who committed suicide with her three children...

The Holocaust is a complex topic for adults to contend with. It is an even more difficult subject for children, which is why Morris Gleitzman's book Once, published in 2005, is so important.

Once attempts to distill the Holocaust into something...

Kindertransport is Diane Samuels' play, first published and performed in 1993. Samuels' play follows the evacuation effort in pre-World War II Germany from 1938 to 1939 and saw Jewish children's movement from Nazi-controlled areas to safe zones in...

Gish Jen's "In the American Society" is a poignant short story that first appeared in a literary magazine in 1986 and later became part of her critically acclaimed short story collection, Who's Irish?, published in 1999. The title itself captures...

V.S. Naipaul is one of the best-known Carribean writers ever. His work, which focuses on the human condition, has been widely-read and is still in print today. One of Naipual's most acclaimed novels is A Bend in the River, published in 1979 and...

In Wild (2012), Cheryl Strayed wrote one of the most financially successful memoirs ever. Strayed published another book in 2012 called Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of self-help essays she wrote anonymously on the website of The Rumpus, a...

Emily Dickinson, the renowned American poet, is widely celebrated as one of the most important literary figures of all time. Among her many masterpieces is "A Murmur in the Trees—to note—," a poem likely written in 1862, but not published until...

It would be fair to say that American author Ann Napolitano is one of the most widely read and important authors of her time. Hello Beautiful, Napolitano's fourth novel inspired by Little Women and first published in 2023, cements her legacy as...

The Mysterious Benedict Society, which was published in 2007, is the first novel in author Trenton Lee Stewart's quartet of children's novels called "The Mysterious Benedict Society." The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) follows four children...

English author Philip Reeve began his career as an illustrator, something which is reflected in his writing style. Unlike some other writers, Reeve doesn't plan before he writes. Instead, he starts writing with an opening and closing image in...

Few know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work outside of his most famous character: Sherlock Holmes. But Doyle was a prolific writer who crafted some of the best short stories in existence. One such short story is called "How It Happened," which was...

Mona Awad's Bunny was first published in June 2019. Awad's novel follows a young woman named Samantha Heather Mackey, who feels like an outsider in her tiny and incredibly selective Master of Fine Art Arts program at a university in New England....

Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six was first published in 2019 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller, selling millions of copies in countries across the world. Reid's novel received mostly positive reviews.

In their review, ...

November 9, which was initially published in 2015, is a novel about fate, its connection to love, and love at first sight. It tells the story of a young woman named Fallon, who one day—by pure happenstance—meets a young man named Ben, who wants to...

It would be difficult to distill the experiences of a generation of English children who lived through World War II into a single volume, let alone a children's book. The War That Saved My Life, which was published in 2015, does just that. It...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu Nigeria Sto a middle-class family and was raised with a strong emphasis on education and literature. Her experiences growing up in Nigeria and witnessing the socio-political issues faced by her...

Hang Kang's Human Acts was first published serially in an online literary magazine from 2013 to 2014 and published in book form in 2014. It is a dramatization of the so-called Gwangju Uprising, which took place in South Korea in 1980 and aimed to...

Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, the Mule, the Fox and the Horse is a children's illustrated book first published in 2019. The novel examines the relationship between the four people—the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse—mentioned in the title of...

The Other Side of Truth was published in 2000. It was inspired by real-life events from 1995 and is told from the perspective of a young girl named Sade Solaja, who immigrated from Nigeria at a young age after her mother was shot and killed by the...

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (2019) is Holly Jackson's debut novel. Jackson, 30, had long wanted to write a novel. She started to write A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, a "true crime obsession." Prior to writing the novel, Jackson devoured...

Horse: A Novel is a historical fiction novel written by Australian-American author Geraldine Brooks. It was published by Viking on 14th June 2022. Brooks based the story on the renowned Thoroughbred horse Lexington.

In 2019, Theo—a Nigerian...